New book reveals the dark and dorky side of real estate
Paul Luke
Province
Tom and Kerrie Everitt have compiled a book of strange tales from the real-estate industry called True Real Estate Stories. Photograph by : Jason Payne, The Province
If you think the real-estate world has treated you badly — or weirdly — consider the realtor who opened the door to a showing and found a corpse.
Or the buyer who fell in love with a 200-year-old Greek house with no bathroom but a suspiciously well-fertilized garden sprouting cabbages the size of footballs.
How about a British villager digging holes for a kennel when her spade struck an unexploded German bomb? Or the Kentucky realtor who meets an adulterous ghost at a grand piano? These and 65 other tales are stuffed into True Real Estate Stories (self-published, $22.95), a new book by Tom and Kerrie Everitt, husband-and-wife realtors from Vancouver.
a book two years ago when workers resodding their backyard unearthed the tombstone of a First World War veteran.
Convinced there must be more such stories, they launched a website, truerealestatestories.com, and invited people to share experiences.
Stories about neighbours, tenants, agents and landlords from hell — and heaven — flowed in from across the globe.
The Everitts may be be top-selling Vancouver realtors with Dexter Associates, but their book confirms their skills as therapists, cross- cultural sociologists and poets of perverse property.
“If my clients say, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how difficult that was,’ I wanted to be able to say, ‘Read this. That’s nothing,'” says Tom, who has a BA in English. “We wanted an entertaining book about the human side of real estate.” Not to mention the supernatural side, the over-sexed side and the angelic side.
Some of the stories are so astounding, they beggar belief.
That’s where Kerrie’s legal background came in handy. A former corporate lawyer with McCarthy Tetrault, Kerrie had each author sign a document attesting to the factual basis of a story.
“That’s the only way you can do it,” she says. “The whole point of this book is they are true stories.” The Everitts paid $75 to $150 per contribution.
Huge film buffs, Tom and Kerrie named each tale after a movie and divided the book into 14 genres: horror, comedy, action, family entertainment, and so on.
The book, which will be officially launched Thursday, delivers enough chills to give it an irresistible marketing link to Halloween. In one of his 69 introductions, Tom reveals they get more ghost stories than any other category. The book abounds with blobs, bones in basements, pet cemeteries and poltergeists.
Many stories venture well beyond the weird into the hilarious — or heart-rending.
One of Kerrie’s favourite stories concerns a Massachusetts couple who want to buy a house and find a child’s grave in the backyard. Not only that — there is a perpetual easement attached to the property, giving the deceased’s family unlimited access to the grave. Moved but not scared, the couple buys it anyway.
On a lighter note, Tom, 40, is fond of a tale in the “X-Rated” chapter in which the narrator describes how exuberant tenants make boisterous whoopee in the unit above hers.
“It was like living inside the audio track of a porno movie,” she writes. “After a while . . . I rated the lovers on performance time and vocalization.”
One woman befriends the neighbourhood gossip, only to discover this neighbour has a telescope pointed across the street at her bedroom (“The Spy Who Loved Me”).
The Everitts learned the idiosyncrasies of international markets while preparing the book. Sixty per cent of the stories are from the U.S., 30 per cent from Canada and 10 per cent from Europe or the Middle East.
An elderly American woman submitted a story about how someone actually bought her house the first day it was listed.
“I had to tell her there are situations in Vancouver where there are 25 offers and a house may go $650,000 over the asking price,” Tom says.
True Real Estate Stories will soon be available in bookstores and can also be purchased through the Everitts‘ website. Portions of the profits will be donated to Habitat for Humanity.
Tom and Kerrie are already contemplating a sequel. They foresee a tidal wave of tragic tales from the subprime crisis in the U.S.
© The Vancouver Province 2007
